Thameside Primary School Community Garden

Summary

Thameside Primary School have been working Food4Families to create a garden where families can learn how to grow fruit and vegetables. Due to the limited green space the garden is mainly in containers with 4 raised in the corner of the playing field.

The Thameside  garden project kicked off on April the 7^th with a fantastic turnout of children and parents to the ‘ Silly Spuds’ session, when we all planted potatoes in a variety of found containers, including hessian bags, old plastic recycling boxes and compost bags.  Since then the group have planted seeds in pots; which went home for the Easter break , created the raised bed garden in a corner of the school field,  filled and planted lots more containers with a variety  of beans, tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers lettuce and parsnips, and worked with Robyn, a fine arts’ student from Reading university, to create and learn about water saving vertical garden in a sack. One family now have their own vertical sack garden on their balcony which is planted up with a variety of edible produce.

We seem to have overcome the extremely dry conditions as the children are keen waterers and have worked with their teacher, Miss Turner, to ensure the containers are watered regularly.

Our next jobs will be to plant up the raised beds, one of which is at a wheelchair friendly height, with soft fruits and herbs. We also plan to plant some saplings along the eastern fence.